In Over My Head

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The exam is at 8 AM and it’s now 2 AM. The fingers of my right hand are twitching just thinking about it. English 440: The Foundations of Western Literature. The course was taught by Dr. Virgil Kennedy Rexroth. Old Rex. A dinosaur if ever there was one. The Foundations of Western Literature. It’s one of those topics that sounds manageable at first. Solid, with pillars like the Parthenon or Solomon’s Temple.

But is there enough ink in my pen to cover such a topic? Where does it even start, and where on earth does it end? You find a container to fit it in, and it spills over the brim. You find a cement wall and then you find out that there are things beyond that wall.

Two weeks ago I handed in my final paper. In it I challenged Old Rex’s idea that Greece and Israel were the foundations of Western Literature. According to him, all the Great Thoughts flowed from there into the Tiber, the Seine, and the Thames. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Nile and the Euphrates.

Whenever Old Rex said something like “The Jews invented monotheism” or “The Greeks invented the epic,” I grit my teeth and kept my mouth shut. The last thing I wanted to see was another old man taking out his stick.

Besides, I knew my friend Juniper would jump into the fray and slay the beast. She always confronted Old Rex far more effectively than I ever could. She was a genius at the subtle sarcastic attack and the unforeseen frontal blow. With her pink hair and her flashing green eyes, she was my spandex superheroine.

It didn’t hurt that she was also a girl, which made her a valuable commodity in these evil days of political correction, kickass grrls, political re-correction, and naked emperors with new clothes. All those naked emperor who get showered with golden compliments in oval offices from Washington to Moscow to Pyongyang.

Still, my silence in class wasn’t very chivalric, to be sure. I guess I wanted to save my own skin. I didn’t want to antagonize the one Old White Male who might give me a decent recommendation for grad school. Might being the operative word.

And yet I couldn’t hold back any longer. I held out for seven months, but eight was one month too many. I didn’t even decide to change course, from tacit agreement to open dissent. I just changed course. It was instinctive. I had to make my argument, even though I knew that Old Rex didn’t want to hear it. Even though it might tank my career, that was on the verge of beginning.

Couldn’t I for once have walked away from a male authority figure without challenging him? Couldn’t I have walked up to his desk after the last class and handed him a paper he actually wanted to read?

The simple answers to these two questions are: No, and No.

Let me explain.

My problem with male authority figures is an old one, and runs very deep. It has three particular causes, and one cause in particular. This cause comes from one week during my childhood, when at the age of 11 I fell from the obedient sky. I fell past the innocent birds and the angels playing harps onto the hard Alberta plain, where the king’s horses, the buffalo, and the dinosaurs roam.

Let me explain.

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I was born in the province of Alberta, that conservative, oil-rich province east of the Rocky Mountains. A northern Texas, but with ski resorts and tundra. I was brought up in Calgary, a mere Stone Age throw from the strange Hoodoo formations left by some alien tribe, and the dinosaur bones that still haunt the prairies.

Both my parents were brought up on prairie farms. My father worked nights in an asylum to get his business and law degrees. He started out negotiating contracts for oil companies in Southern Alberta. This allowed the companies to drill beneath the ground, into what remains of the Cretaceous Seaway which existed for 34 million years, back when the birds and the dinosaurs roamed.

Eventually the farm boy from Fort Saskatchewan worked for a French oil company in Calgary, which is how we ended up in Paris and Geneva for several years. Paris was a particular shock. Connoisseurs of baseball, the mall, hockey, and Dairy Queen, we were like a family of Triceratops visiting Madame de Staël at her salon on Rue du Bac.

At 15 I was set loose in the streets of Paris, where there was no enforced drinking age. In Calgary my friends and I had to find an urban cowboy or a rig-pig who was willing to bootleg a bottle of cheap whiskey or cooking sherry. Invariably, they drove a dusty pickup truck with mud on its fenders. (Back in the days when SUVs hadn’t been invented a pickup truck or a jeep still stood out among the Datsuns and station wagons). It was a genuine pleasure to meet one of these rough guys who had escaped from the farms and back-woods of Alberta. Back then, they weren’t anti-vaxer MAGA types. They were just guys who once lived on farms and in small towns and still didn’t care much for the rules of the city.

Having bought the booze, the guy would met us next to his truck, and gave us a bottle in a slim brown paper bag. He’d hand the bottle over with a tender look in his eyes, as if he remembered what it was like to be young. As if in his remembrance of things past he too had been crushed by some young beauty, and had afterwards found himself too young to deal with it emotionally, and too young to buy his oblivion legally. He didn’t need to say anything, and he never asked for a tip.

In Paris you didn’t need to size up anyone outside a liquor store. In fact there were hardly any “liquor stores,” so to speak. You just walked into a corner store and came out beaming, with a six-pack of Kronenbourg or Stella Artois. Walking down the street, you started to see that Europe had its charms.

But then again it had its drawbacks too. One day I was hitchhiking in the middle of Paris, God knows why. I saw a red Ferrari stopping in front of me. A tough-looking, elegant man in a black leather jacket told me to hop in. I couldn’t believe it: I was in a Ferrari! But then he asked, Do you like girls? I answered, Oui, bien sûr. But then he put his big right hand on my thigh. Maybe he had asked, Do I like boys? — my French wasn’t very good. His hand was gripping my thigh tightly, and far too close to my other thigh. At the first red light I opened the door and bolted. On the sidewalk I thought, What if he had locked the door from his side? I hid for twenty minutes in an underground parking lot, swearing to buy a set of nunchaku. I swore to myself that I’d crack the head of any man who tried that again.

In Paris I also learned two contradictory things: first, throwing rocks at policeman was a viable form of political expression; second, it wasn’t necessary to act like an idiot in order to impress girls. Yet it was difficult to change someone like me. Just ask my parents. By the time we left Paris I hadn’t learned to throw a molotov cocktail properly. I also continued to act like an idiot in order to impress girls.

Coming back to Calgary from Paris wasn’t easy. One week I was having desert with a Russian girl on the Champs-Elysées, and the next week I was at a keg party in the sticks acting like an idiot. Here’s the Russian girl outside my school in Paris, and here’s me tearing around the forest on my Suzuki 90 the year before we left for Paris. I’m still trying to reconcile these two images.

After Paris I didn’t care about motorcycles. My body was in Calgary but my spirit was in Paris. I was 17 years old and waist-deep in teenage angst. Seventeen! — they even have a magazine to remind you about all the girls you failed to impress.

Somehow I got my act together and completed several years of university, ending up in Vancouver to finish my B.A.

I love this city’s mix of grit & polish, beaches & mountains, skyscrapers & cafes. And yet, having grown up in Calgary, I can’t get used to the skid row here, or the random knife attacks, or all the drugged-out fucked-up angry people on the streets. Vancouver reminds me of San Francisco: a city of poets, magic carpets, oceanfront parks, cyber-junkies, skyscrapers, and violent souls.

In my spare time I write stories about epic journeys and existential wastelands. I write about spies and sorcerers from faraway galaxies, about devils and angels who rework their ancient grudges in my head. I keep these stories in a blue binder, with the working title, Demons & Wizards. I taped an old Uriah Heep CD cover to the front of the binder, to remind me where I got all this nonsense.

The reason I’m so interested in demons and wizards is that I feel adrift in the world. I have far more questions than answers. Wouldn’t it be great if some magical Being could pluck us from the cosmic tempest and steer us back onto solid ground? Or if we could look up into the black sky and see Shakespeare’s star, that “ever-fixèd mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken,” that “star to every wandering bark / Whose worth’s unknown, although its height be taken”? Yet who has found this star? Some people say it’s right there in a holy book. But none of these people are astronomers.

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